Graham Charlton's Blog

Professor David Crystal is a linguistics expert and has developed 'semantic ad targeting' technology that he claims can be used to more accurately place ads in the correct context.

Professor Crystal recently sold his company Crystal Semantics to online ad network ad pepper media, which has used the technology to launch its iSense targeting system.

We talked to Prof. Crystal and ad pepper's board director Sacha Carton about the technology...

This week sees the launch of Tesco Digital, the supermarket giant's answer to iTunes.

We've taken a look at the new site to see how it compares with Apple's all-conquering download store, which has accounted for around 70% of worldwide online digital music sales.

We recently compared ITV's online video player to the BBC's iPlayer, finding that the ITV offering was far less usable than its rival.

ITV has since launched a new and improved version of its online TV service, so we've taken another look at it to see where the improvements have been made...

The Wall Street Journal carried an article last week about the problems consumer electronics etailers are having with returns.

Only 5% of returns were due to defective products and etailers spent $13.8m (£7bn) reselling returned products, so how best to deal with what is clearly a major issue? 

Having kept its technology under wraps for more than a year, 'natural language search engine' Powerset has finally opened up to the public.

Brian Clifton is a search and web analytics expert. From 2005, Brian was Google's Head of Web Analytics for Europe, Middle East and Africa.

He recently left Google to become Senior Strategist for Omega Digital Media. We caught up with Brian to ask him about his experiences at Google, his views on web analytics and his new book.

Booking and researching holidays and flights online has become more and more popular over the last few years. In 2007, the online travel market in the UK was worth £11.2 bn.

Booking a holiday online can be a complicated process, so it's important to make it as easy to use and understand for customers. Many travel websites are frustrating to use, so how does Thomas Cook fare? It's pretty good, but we have nevertheless suggested a few improvements after the jump...

Here, we ask Dominic Yacoubian, MD of 247electrical , about the continuing problem of online fraud, how his company is affected by it and what he feels needs to be done to better combat the problem.

Viewzi offers an alternative to the traditional text view of search results. It recently launched in beta, so we've taken a look.

No matter how successful an e-commerce site is, there are often ways in which a site can be improved to maintain its appeal to customers and maximise conversions.

We have looked at M&S, Amazon and Tesco already, now we take a look at Next to see what improvements could be made to their website...